1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to contacts.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic apparatuses such as cellular phones and smartphones have been reduced in size and thickness, and in response to this, the form of mounting parts on a printed circuit board (hereinafter abbreviated to “board”) provided inside apparatuses has mostly shifted to the surface mounting of chip parts.
In these electronic apparatuses, a ground (GND) line of the board is connected to a conductor panel of the enclosure (so-called frame grounding [FG]) in order to protect electronic parts mounted on the board and to deal with noise. Frame grounding is also performed between boards. In this case, a surface-mount contact is used to connect respective conductors of the boards.
The contact used in FG is a member having a spring characteristic, formed by bending a leaf spring to have a predetermined amount of stroke. The contact is joined to a conductor of one of the boards and is compressed by being pressed by the other of the boards to electrically connect the conductors of the boards.
A spring part of the contact may be broken if a load is applied on the spring part from a lateral direction perpendicular to the stroke directions of the contact. Therefore, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2002-015801 proposes a terminal member including protection walls that longitudinally cover both sides of a contact point part elastically deformed in a direction to approach a fixation part of a spring part.